


The Importance of Human Anatomy

by coffee_rings



Category: Seraphina - Rachel Hartman
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Gen, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, author is non-binary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:35:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28029402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffee_rings/pseuds/coffee_rings
Summary: According to Seraphina, Orma “didn’t need facial hair to pass” but “just liked the way it looked.”Why?
Relationships: Linn Dombegh & Orma (Seraphina), Orma (Seraphina) & Seraphina Dombegh
Kudos: 3





	The Importance of Human Anatomy

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this as an assignment for a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies class on Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, because ORMA IS TRANS!! But also I have only read the first book in the series, just fyi.
> 
> And if you're the professor or TA of that class checking to see if I posted it anywhere, hello! I did! Thank you for the A on it, and please do not read my other works. Cheers <3

The dragon named Orma began its formal education soon after its 40th hatch-day. In the tradition of Golya, the first and most basic lesson was how to take a saarantras.

At the age of 40, all the students in the introductory class were still technically hatchlings, just reaching the age of dragon reproductive maturity. This meant that in addition to the usual newskin problem of taking slightly strange proportions, there was also the issue that they were turning into pubescent human forms. Therefore it was no surprise that most of the first attempts managed to be simultaneously gangly, lumpy, and speckled with skin imperfections.

“Huh,” was all Orma thought after transforming for the first time. There were quite a few things to dislike about this body already; it was pitifully tiny, the sense of smell was nearly non-existent, and the eyesight was incredibly blurry, making it hard to assess the rest of the body even as Orma looked down at it. While all the newskins inspected and prodded their raw, naked bodies, Orma made a mental note to make the torso more streamlined next time.

The second and third transformations showed vast improvements. In fact, Orma was one of the better students in the class, mastering “fingernails instead of claws” and “shoulder blades that are not actually sharp” before many of the others in the cohort. The only part still causing difficulty was the chest. When Orma raised one perfectly formed arm to ask about it, the teacher nodded and said to the class, “Yes, humans are distressingly dimorphic. About half of you will experience this, and more dramatically so as you reach the end of adolescence.” Orma had no particular feelings about this, which boded well for the upcoming classes on Keeping Ard.

From then on, all other subjects (Clothing, Dreaming, Human Behavior, and so forth) were taken in their saarantrai. Orma turned out to be gifted in language learning, too; while all its agemates were still learning to wrestle their new tongues into forming the unfamiliar phonemes of Goreddi, Porphyrian, and Samsamese, Orma was already trying to form sentences.

“ _I eat, you eat, he/she/it eats…_ ” Orma conjugated by rote in Goreddi before switching back to Mootya to ask, “Teacher, what are the different third person singular pronouns for?”

The teacher blinked several times before answering, seemingly frustrated by the question. “That’s something for your Human Behavior teacher to explain. But for now, suffice it to say that humans consider their sex to be integral to their identities, even beyond matters of mating. The words ‘ _he_ ’ and ‘ _she_ ’ in Goreddi indicate sex the same way ‘father’ and ‘mother’ do in Mootya—even though they are used constantly, and in sentences having nothing to do with tracing bloodlines!” The teacher’s face scrunched in a nearly human expression of disgust. “It’s one of the more complicated, illogical, and frankly annoying aspects of most human languages.” In subsequent speaking exercises, the newskins practiced using all of the forms without really understanding why.

It wasn’t until they finally advanced to the subject of Human Behavior that Orma learned that humans carried a concept of gender around with them their whole lives, from “ _boy”_ and “ _girl”_ to “ _man”_ and “ _woman,”_ regardless of whether they were mated or—no, whether they were “ _married”_ or “ _unmarried”_. Gender influenced not only their third person pronouns, but also their clothes, professions, and (ostensibly) traits like strength and intelligence. Orma did not understand why no one else in the class seemed to find these beliefs intriguing.

But by far, Orma’s favorite lesson was when they listened to music for the first time. Though Orma had heard music before as a dragon, saarantrai ears picked it up differently. Music sounded good, and enjoyable, and… meaningful. Tickling some sweet part of the mind, just as Linn had said it would. The lesson was immediately followed up by a meditation to help them control any emotions that may have arisen due to the volatility of the wet brain.

When it came time for their first practicum, a carefully chaperoned foray into human society, they all donned matching uniforms and were led through the streets of Lavondaville in their saarantrai. They were all stumbling awkwardly over the cobblestones, still unused to having their footing so easily upset by uneven terrain. Orma tripped slightly before regaining balance again.

“Mister! Wait! You dropped this!” called a small human child, running up to return a charcoal pencil that had fallen from Orma’s pocket. Orma turned to peer curiously at the creature, blood suddenly humming with energy. The child immediately went pale. “Miss? O-or…saar? Sorry—” The child’s guardian dragged it away within seconds. As the field trip ended, Orma realized that the child’s voice had struck a chord in his brain the same way music had.

And that was a very dangerous thought.

“I think I will try to qualify for a bell exemption,” Orma announced to Linn. It was many years later, as he was taking a break from his studies in Ninys to visit her in Goredd. They met at the Quighole public house, both in their saarantrai and blending in remarkably well. Without her bells, Linn passed as a human woman. And with his bells, Orma usually passed as a male saar.

“Your research is going well, then?” Linn asked over their mugs of barley water.

“Yes. I have come up with a research proposal.”

“Let’s hear it.” Linn steepled her fingers and smiled a very convincingly human smile.

“I will study Goreddi interspecies gender dynamics in a way no one has before. I plan to undergo a voluntary excision—”

Linn gasped in horror.

“—of the body, not the brain,” Orma clarified. “I have already located a surgeon who would modify my saarantras. Only the torso would be required; it is far easier to disguise the absence of something expected than the presence of something unexpected. That way, I will be able to easily present as either gender simply by altering my dress, speech, and mannerisms.”

“But… is that really necessary?”

Orma frowned. He had thought she would understand. “Yes. There is unexplored complexity to this aspect of human culture. With gender comes sexism, and marriage, and Daanites, and anti-Daanite sentiment, and all sorts of other illogical—but predictable—behavior. All I want is to learn how to predict it.”

“Is that what you told the Board of Censors?” Linn asked more quietly.

Fire flared in Orma’s stomach. Which was bizarre, because he was in his saarantras. “There is nothing undragonlike about it!” he snapped. “If anything, I am merely bringing this mammalian body back in ard by making it more featureless, more reptilian. If the possibility exists, we must do the experiment! It is not mere autogratification!”

Linn’s gaze softened. “I apologize, little sibling. You know I support your research.” She reached across the table and brushed their fingertips together.

Orma yanked his hand away. “ _You_ are the one who should fear the Censors. I know how you feel about music. And about that—that man—”

“And I know how you feel about this.” Linn regarded him seriously. “You think I don’t see how you are more relaxed on the days you wear trousers? How you smile when you overhear humans speaking of you as a man? I just don’t see why you need to change anything other than your clothing, since you already seem to pass as male when you dress this way. Surely you don’t intend to mate—”

“Unlike you,” Orma muttered.

“—so no one will even look that closely at you,” continued Linn, ignoring him. “So why—”

“Because it’s not just a costume!” Orma found himself raising his voice, not knowing why. “Because it changes how I feel about myself!”

Linn gave him a sympathetic look. His silver blood _boiled_.

“We are not alike,” he hissed. “You may be my teacher, but I am more like _them_.” He pointed to the quigutl at the table next to them, the hollow tubes of their tongues whistling as they spoke. “Their anatomy is not well suited to human language, but wouldn’t it be beneficial to them if they could speak Goreddi? Wouldn’t it be rational if they wanted to? Would it really make them more human if they tried to achieve that through physical modification?”

“Perhaps it is not a bad thing to be more human,” said Linn quietly.

“We are not alike,” Orma repeated, furious for reasons he couldn’t comprehend. “I will keep your secrets—though anyone who hears you play the flute will know that you are emotionally compromised—but I am not like you. I do not love humans the way you do.”

“I loved music first,” said Linn. “And then I found someone else who felt the same way, and loved them too.”

“I do not love anything. I would simply prefer to be seen the way I choose without this body getting in the way.”

“You mean you prefer to live as a saarantras than as a dragon,” Linn said flatly. “You love being a man, just as I love being a woman. You feel like something is missing when you return to the Tanamoot, don’t you? You hate when you turn back and can no longer understand it, all of its imperfections and intricacies. You miss it the way I miss music. Gender is your art. You want to perform it, and it feels euphoric when you get it right. There is truth in the art.”

The words landed hard on Orma’s saarantrai ears, going straight to that overreactive part of his brain. “You’re wrong,” he said. His hands shook as he pushed back his chair and rose from the table. “And you cannot dissuade me from my course of study.”

“Little brother, I am not trying to dissuade you,” said Linn. “I understand you. Oh, little brother. Just be careful—” Orma turned on his heel and left.

Orma went through with the excision. It was only his saarantras, not his true form, and it was only for the pursuit of knowledge, but as he transformed in preparation, he could feel the moment that the words “ _little sibling_ ” turned back into “ _little brother_ ” in his head. “I am ready,” he told the saar surgeon. _Put me back in ard._

As the years wore on, Orma never forgot Linn’s words, though he never fully agreed with what she’d said, either. He was diligent about his research, spending half the time presenting as female and half the time as male, collecting data from both viewpoints. (It was coincidental that his male life was the one he called Orma and the female life was the one he made up a fake name for. It was coincidental that the words “he” and “him” still felt meaningful every time he heard them.) The only thing he couldn’t explain was why he found himself spending more and more time as Orma until it was the only life he was living. He woke up every morning and put on trousers and a beard, even though it shouldn’t have mattered to him. He started hiding this from the Censors, but only because they wouldn’t understand.

He only began to realize Linn may have been right when she died, when he looked down at her child who refused to nurse unless sung to on key. “It has a discriminating ear,” he said, momentarily forgetting all his research demonstrating that the pronoun “it” was as dehumanizing as it was gender-neutral. For how could a newborn feel anything about its gender the way he did?

His worst fear was confirmed the day that she—for she was a girl, after all—concluded a week of feverish scratching and screaming with a day of disconsolate sobbing, staring down at her raw, naked scales. “Why are you crying?” he asked. “It will be easy enough to hide.”

“Oh, Orma,” Seraphina cried. “It changes how I feel about myself.” She buried her face in her hands and wept.

Their blood may have been different colors, but Orma knew how that felt inside.

From that day forth, Orma bought Seraphina clothes with long, tight sleeves to hide her wrists. He went to Quighole to get ointment for her itchy scales every time it ran out, remembering his own scars. He taught her how to live in a world that did not believe she existed.

It was because Orma loved Seraphina that he knew Linn had been right. _This_ was what the Censors would excise him for.

**Author's Note:**

> Evidence that this interpretation is technically plausible:
> 
> Dragons do not necessarily use gendered pronouns (p. 29), dragons cannot alter their saarantrai on command (pp. 131 and 401), and dragon education involves practicing being in their saarantrai (p. 198). I decided to interpret one line where Seraphina describes Lady Corongi and mentions “makeup condensing in the creases of her face” (p. 109) as proof that a dragon’s saarantras physically ages along with them, though I am not sure about that. I have no idea how long dragon life expectancy is, but I did some math involving the knowledge that the Comonot’s Treaty is 40 years old, that Seraphina is 16 years old, and that Linn was alive to celebrate Orma’s 59th hatch-day to arbitrarily decide that dragons come of age when they are about 40. 
> 
> Again, I haven't read the sequel so if any of this is proven untrue later, I didn't know about it.


End file.
